Creationism: the one instance where it's considered perfectly normal behaviour to brutally beat a patch of grass where twenty years ago, there used to be a horse.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Get Intelligent Design into the Classroom in 6 easy steps

1. Actually come up with a theory of Intelligent Design. It must make positive, testable predictions beyond "Evolution is wrong, therefore Intelligentdesignerdidit." It must make predictions of the form "if intelligentdesignerdidit, then when we perform experiment x, we will observe y." Observing something other than y must disprove the theory of Intelligent Design.

2. Perform experiments. The results of those experiments must not be explainable by the theory of evolution, or by any other explanation other than an intelligent designer. In the course of these experiments, you must make a concerted effort to conclusively disprove that an intelligent agency had any hand in the creation of life, and for every single experiment, there must be a result predicted which would disprove the action of an intelligence.

3. Repeat step 2. A lot.

4. Publish the results obtained in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

5. Repeat steps 2-4. A lot.

6. Sit back, relax and enjoy a beer, and keep your Nobel prize polished to a healthy shine while ID is automatically inserted into science textbooks everywhere, and becomes the new standard in science education in biology.

Do these six things and no scientist on earth will object to ID being inserted into science class. Evolution has done this many times over. That's why it's in science textbooks right now. If ID did the exact same thing, it'd be in the science texts within the next 20 years, easily.

No comments:

Me.

I'm a 20-something post-doc with the Center for Cardiovascular Research in Honolulu, Hawaii. I study the transcriptional effects of HIF-1 in cardiomyocytes and my work centers around developing a novel mathematical model describing the downstream effects of HIF-1. I've been interested in the ID/Creationism/Evolution debate for some time now, and I thought it was about time that I put some of my thoughts out there in a way that people would actually consider reading.